Healing connection between story-teller and story-listener through stories

Ildikó BOLDIZSÁR

Ildikó BOLDIZSÁR

I began to work as a story-therapist in 1996. I went to hospitals to tell stories to children and adults, and I gained a great deal of experience that I was later able to use in my practice as a therapist. I spent more than fifteen years pursuing research on theoretical aspects of storytelling, I began to take an increasing interest in the practical uses of stories. After another decade of first-hand experience, I developed the Metamorphoses Story Therapy Method, which I presented in a book that was published in 2010 for people who use this method in their work (for instance, in hospitals, educational counsels, schools, prisons and psychotherapeutic consultations).

Abstract

Healing connection between story-teller and story-listener through stories

Metamorphoses story-therapy is based on the concept that there is no situation in life that does not correspond to a story. During the course of the therapy, we find the story with the best fit for the given situation, in which the hero sets forth into the world for the same reasons and seeks to realise the same ambitions as my patient but is better able to overcome the obstacles in his path. The hero of the chosen story is not killed by the dragon or turned to stone but manages to take his journey to its conclusion. The process of therapy leads us to investigate the reasons for a patient failing to overcome the obstacles in his path. In the course of my work, I have told stories to people under the most extraordinary array of circumstances. I have told stories to babies still in the womb, to women in labor, to children yearning to understand the world around them, to teenagers yearning to understand themselves, to young adults fearing both divorce and commitment, to mature men and women, and to the dying. I have told stories at funerals and at weddings. I have told stories in prisons, reform centers, orphanages, institutes for the blind, libraries, banks, schools, university seminars, and hospitals.

Stories have helped me come to know all walks of life, and in each walk of life I have told different stories to people beset with woe, as the circumstances and the person him or herself demanded. For no matter what I come across in life, a moment of joy or sadness, hope or grief, it always reminds me of a story.